Broadcom Introduces WatchTower: Streamlining Operations and Improving Business Continuity

Broadcom Inc AVGO unveiled the WatchTower Platform today, an innovative open observability solution aimed at enhancing business performance by simplifying the identification and resolution of priority incidents within the mainframe environment.

By integrating and correlating a broad spectrum of events, data flows, signals, and metrics, WatchTower breaks down IT silos, fostering more efficient operations, teamwork, and workflow coordination.

It refines alerts by adding relevant context, enabling teams to focus on critical alerts essential for uninterrupted business operations.

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Leveraging the base of existing mainframe AIOps solutions, WatchTower extends the visibility of mainframe telemetry into enterprise observability tools, creating a unified experience that caters to various expertise levels. This early detection capability allows for proactively managing issues before they affect operations.

Greg Lotko, Broadcom’s senior vice president and general manager of the Mainframe Software Division, emphasized the challenge IT teams face with the overwhelming data growth, highlighting WatchTower’s role in enhancing visibility for better resource performance monitoring and problem resolution.

WatchTower’s significance is echoed by Mohesh Punjabi, executive director at Morgan Stanley, who noted the platform’s ability to shift mainframe operations from reactive recovery to proactive problem avoidance by leveraging early detection systems.

Additionally, WatchTower incorporates OpenTelemetry, enabling it to stream important insights and mainframe performance data directly to observability tools such as Datadog, Grafana, New Relic, Splunk, and Jaeger.

Recently, Broadcom halted the sale of its security software unit, Carbon Black, which was likely to fetch around $1 billion, including debt, after the offers received did not meet the company’s expectations.

The company had been looking to offload Carbon Black alongside its end-user computing division. The latter caught the interest of KKR & Co Inc, which agreed to a purchase price of about $4 billion.